|
U.S. Growing Elite Opposition to Military Option Against Iran By Jim Lobe* WASHINGTON, Jan 26, 2012 (IPS) - Like the imminent prospect of one's hanging, to paraphrase the
18th century British essayist Dr. (Samuel) Johnson, the
suddenly looming possibility of war can concentrate the mind
wonderfully.
If that aphorism didn't apply in the run-up to the U.S. invasion of
Iraq 10 years ago, it appears to be the case now for key sectors of
the U.S. foreign-policy elite - notably, liberal hawks who supported
the Iraq war - with regard to the sharp rise in tensions between Iran
and both the U.S. and Israel earlier this month.
Amid a crescendo of threats by senior Israeli officials to attack
Iran's nuclear facilities, the murder, presumably by Mossad, of a
fifth Iranian nuclear scientist in the past several years, and a
sharp escalation of Western economic sanctions designed to "cripple"
Iran's economy, Tehran's threat to close the Strait of Hormuz brought
the until-then hypothetical possibility of war - whether by design,
provocation or accident - sharply into view.
The hawkish declarations by Republican presidential candidates eager
to prove their love for Israel to Christian fundamentalists and
Jewish voters and donors didn't help, nor did a renewed and
intensified drumbeat for "regime change" by some of the same neo-
conservatives from institutions like the American Enterprise
Institute (AEI) and the Foundation for the Defence of Democracies
(FDD) that led the drive to war in Iraq.
Adding to the sense that war was suddenly a very real possibility,
these events more or less coincided with the publication by the
influential Foreign Affairs journal of an article entitled "Time to
Attack Iran: Why a Strike is the Least Bad Option''. It advocated a
limited and carefully calibrated U.S. aerial attack on Iran's air
defences and nuclear sites, and was authored by an academic, Matthew
Kroenig, who had just completed a one-year stint as a strategic
analyst in the office of the secretary of defence.
The confluence of all these developments provoked a number of
influential members of the foreign policy establishment – including
several prominent liberal interventionists who had supported the Iraq
war – to warn against any further escalation either by the U.S. or
Israel.
"We're doing this terrible thing all over again," wrote Leslie Gelb,
the president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, the think
tank that publishes Foreign Affairs, in the Daily Beast, in an appeal
for Senate hearings on the implications of war with Iran.
"As before, we're letting a bunch of ignorant, sloppy-thinking
politicians and politicized foreign-policy experts draw 'red line'
ultimatums. As before, we're letting them quick-march us off to war,"
warned Gelb, a repentant Iraq-war hawk, about the chorus of neo-
conservatives and other hawks with whom he had previously been
aligned.
On the pages of The New Republic, Kenneth Pollack, a former top CIA
analyst at the Brookings Institution whose 2002 book, "The
Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq", was cited frequently
by liberal hawks before the war, argued not only against any
further
escalation, but also suggested that the sanctions track on which the
Barack Obama administration and the European Union have increasingly
relied was proving counterproductive.
"The problem is that these sanctions (against the Central Bank of
Iran) are potentially so damaging that they could backfire," he
wrote, citing their possible negative impact on the West's own
struggling economies and the difficulty of sustaining them
diplomatically over time if they resulted in the kind of
"humanitarian catastrophe" inflicted by the sanctions regime against
Iraq from 1992 until the invasion.
Moreover, he went on, "…the more we turn up the heat on Iran, the
more Iran will fight back, and the way they like to fight back could
easily lead to unintended escalation. Doubtless such a war would
leave Iran far, far worse off than it would leave us. But it would be
painful for us too, and it might last far longer than anyone wants…"
Meanwhile, another influential liberal hawk, Princeton Prof. Anne-
Marie Slaughter, argued in project-syndicate.org that the West
and
Iran were playing a "dangerous game" of "chicken" and that the West's
current course "leaves Iran's government no alternative between
publicly backing down, which it will not do, and escalating its
provocations."
"The more publicly the West threatens Iran, the more easily Iranian
leaders can portray America as the Great Satan to parts of the
Iranian population that have recently been inclined to see the U.S.
as their friend," wrote Slaughter, who stepped down as director of
the policy planning office under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
"It is time for cooler heads to prevail with a strategy that helps
Iran step back," she added, suggesting that the aborted Turkish-
Brazilian 2010 effort at mediation between the P5+1 and Iran be
revived.
Yet another Iraq hawk, New York Times columnist Bill Keller, attacked
the Foreign Affairs article, assuring his readers that Kroenig's
former colleagues at the Pentagon "were pretty appalled by his
article, which combines the alarmist worst case of the Iranian
nuclear threat with the rosiest best case of America's ability to
make things better."
Contrary to Kroenig's predictions, Keller wrote, "…an attack on Iran
is almost certain to unify the Iranian people around the mullahs and
provoke the supreme leader to redouble Iran's nuclear pursuits, only
deeper underground, and without international inspectors around. Over
at the Pentagon, you sometimes hear it put this way: Bombing Iran is
the best way to guarantee exactly what we are trying to prevent."
Indeed, in a reply to Kroenig entitled "Not Time to Attack Iran",
Colin Kahl, who had also just left the Pentagon at the end of
December after two years as the head of Middle East policy, argued
that Kroenig's "picture of a clean, calibrated conflict is a mirage.
Any war with Iran would be a messy and extraordinarily violent
affair, with significant casualties and consequences."
Among other objections, Kahl, a senior fellow at the hawkish Center
for a New American Security (CNAS), predicted that a pre-emptive
strike of the kind promoted by Kroenig could well spark a regional
war, solidify popular support for the regime in Tehran, and transform
"the Arab Spring's populist antiregime narrative into a decidedly
anti-American one."
Indeed, much of Kahl's analysis was subsequently backed up by Gen.
Michael Hayden (ret.), who, as the head of the Central Intelligence
Agency during George W. Bush's second term, could hardly be called a
liberal.
According to the "Cable" blog on foreign policy.com, Hayden, who
served as the head of the Pentagon's National Security Agency from
1999 to 2005, told a small group convened at the Center for National
Interest last week that top Bush national security officials had
concluded that a military strike on Iran's nuclear facilities –
whether by Israel or the U.S. – would be counter-productive.
The Israelis, he reportedly said, "aren't going to (attack Iran)…
They can't do it, it's beyond their capacity. They only have the
ability to make this (problem of Iran's nuclear programme) worse."
And while the U.S. has the ability to mount a campaign, it could only
serve as a short-term fix. "What's move two, three, four or five down
the board? I don't think anyone is talking about occupying anything."
*Jim Lobe's blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at
http://www.lobelog.com.
(END)
|
|
|
|
|
|
|